346. The Immune-Boosting Breaths Pro Athletes Use to Stay Healthy - Jeff Patterson

 [00:00:00] hello and welcome to the meditation conversation, the podcast to support your spiritual revolution. I'm your host, Kara Goodwin, and this is a great episode with guest Jeff Patterson. We cover a range of fascinating topics about meditation and martial arts. He shares fascinating insights about the breath and the immune system and how different breaths are appropriate for different times of the year.

I learned so much in this episode.

Jeff Patterson is a highly experienced martial artist residing in Portland, Oregon, with over 36 years of practice under his belt. Jeff is a firm believer in the benefits of meditative arts and their power to enhance , overall life experiences. Jeff has authored three books, created two audio courses, and produced hundreds of instructional videos sharing his extensive knowledge and expertise.

Through his [00:01:00] dedication and teachings, Jeff has positively impacted the lives of thousands of individuals, providing them with the tools and techniques to improve their overall wellbeing. I know you're going to love this episode and we'll get right to it, but first for you plant lovers out there, are you familiar with pure leaf?

Pure leaf is an alternative and complementary approach to conventional plant care and pest control methods. It's a natural, non toxic alternative for caring for your plants. There are compounds to help give your plants more vitality as well as address plant health issues. As a plant lover myself, I personally love the indoor superfood and nutrient booster.

Try Pure Leaf for yourself and use code KaraG20 for a whopping 20 percent off your order. That's K A R A G 20 for 20 percent off. And now enjoy this episode.

Kara Goodwin: Welcome Jeff. I am so excited to have you here today.

Jeff Patterson: Thank you. I'm excited to be here as [00:02:00] well.

Kara Goodwin: So let's start by talking a little bit about your background and what led you to martial arts.

Jeff Patterson: Yes. So I started in my mid teens and continued training through the, I joined the Marine Corps, went through college training the whole time. I taught martial arts through college to help pay for my education. And then I met a teacher in college who was Uh, a very well known boxing coach.

And I was really into Western boxing then. And, uh, he kind of opened my eyes to some of the other practices, Tai Chi and Chi Kung, some of the meditative practices, getting into Brazilian jiu jitsu and, you know, as, It's as a young guy. Um, you know, my main focus was wanting to do Western boxing and I just loved it.

I love the strategy. I love the game. I love the intensity. And, uh, after meeting this gentleman, I'd [00:03:00] only known him for two or three weeks. And I remember him saying, you know, if you really want to be a good boxer, you should start doing meditation and Tai Chi and you know, I remember thinking, isn't that for like old people in the park?

How, how is that going to help me? You know, and, and, uh, um, I started doing the practice and it, it changed my life in so many ways and, and I wouldn't be where I am today without the practice.

Kara Goodwin: Wow. So I'm curious about, because you do have such extensive experience with the different forms of martial arts. Um, and I'm curious just about what led you to exploring different traditions and what some of the differences and similarities are, um, between martial In a general sense with them.

Jeff Patterson: Well, I think as far as similarities, that's one of the things that meditation and Tai Chi really helps with, because a lot of. [00:04:00] People who do martial arts as a hobby say they do it two or three hours a week. It's really hard to get to a deep root in the practice and the meditative arts help you find that root.

And that sensitivity, uh, teaches you about being more aware of your body, being more grounded, learning how to Use the energy and the movements. And all of this is the same, whether you're doing jujitsu or you're doing Muay Thai, or you're doing Eskrima, it's, uh, those basic core fundamentals. Once you have those at a deep level, it helps you in anything else you do.

And one of my old teachers, he always used to say, if, if, uh, if you can drive a Toyota, you can drive a Honda, you know, you, you learn how to drive and in all of the core fundamentals, the. The basic roots of the practice are pretty much similar,

Kara Goodwin: Okay. And so how does that meditation focus [00:05:00] assist with the physical practices of the martial arts?

Jeff Patterson: in a lot of ways. the meditative practice oftentimes is used not just only in martial arts, but other athletes use it in basketball, baseball, football, um, performers use, uh, the practice of meditation. And. You know, I look at the meditative arts in a pretty broad term. So, you know, there's, you have your movement practices, you have your breath work, you have sitting meditation, walking meditation, standing meditation.

There's so many different directions, you know, within the Qigong itself, we kind of divide it up into five directions. So we have like the martial or athletic side of the training, the therapeutic side, the medical side, the philosophical side, and then also the meditative or spiritual side. And so, You can focus on any one of those areas.

And as far as relating it to [00:06:00] athletics or martial arts one, it helps with getting to just a deeper level of sensitivity and awareness within the body and being able to listen at a high level. It's one thing, for example, in boxing, if I've got to think about what I'm going to do, I already got hit three times.

So learning how to develop that higher sensitivity, and it's almost like you're. You're feeling the energy before the movement ever comes out. The meditation helps you read other people and develop that sensitivity at a higher level. And that's why it's so valuable in athletic sports.

Kara Goodwin: I love that. That's wonderful. So how can you talk a little bit about the performance, you know, that this, so many, um, martial artists and other sports, um, athletes and performers get a lot from meditation. Can you talk about how people have [00:07:00] optimal performance when they're using Qigong and meditation?

Jeff Patterson: Well, it goes back to the, the sensitivity. And with any meditative practice, you want to have ritual practices, active practices, and philosophical practices, you know, meditation is meant to be more of a way of life and less of a hobby. It's something that we integrate into everything we do. And so I always tell new people when they're coming in here.

is that, you know, you want to get to where at a bare minimum, you're doing 20 minutes of a ritual practice every day, and then integrating active practices throughout the day. And the thing, that's great thing about active practices is that you don't have to set a lot of time aside. You can do them in a very short amount of time.

You can do them as little as two or three minutes, and it could be as simple as, Counting out 10 breaths or [00:08:00] doing some energetic circulations in the body or regulating your posture, you know, within the meditative arts, we also have the basic, what we call the five regulations. So regulating the body, regulating the breath, regulating the mind, regulating the energy and regulating the spirit.

Well, all of those things are very in depth and, and there's a lot of practices that are included in those areas, but by having that, yeah. overall awareness that enhances everything you do.

Kara Goodwin: What would be some. Examples you, you talked, I think we could all understand what like a ritual meditation would be. That would be like a seated meditation that you, you implement every day, I'm guessing, or some sort of

practice that you're implementing every day. And then you talked about the active, what would the philosophical meditation encompass?

Jeff Patterson: Yes. So, so ritual practices, like you said, could be a seated practice. It could be a Qigong set, a Tai Chi form, a yoga [00:09:00] routine. It could be anything that you do that has a meditative approach to it, where you set time aside every day. And, you know, meditation is one of those things where You will benefit from it if you do an hour today and then you don't do an hour till next week.

But if you do a little bit every day, it builds up momentum and a year from now, five years from now, 10 years from now, it's a whole different experience than doing it as a hobby once in a while. And so I'd much rather see somebody being consistent at just 20 minutes a day than trying to do two hours today and three hours next week.

And, you know, kind of have this roller coaster kind of. Way, because that's how our emotions on our body functions and that baseline rhythm and keeping that smooth and even is so important. The active practices, um, like I mentioned, there are little things that you can do throughout the day. And one trick I like to [00:10:00] do with that, to help with new students, to get them in the habit of utilizing active practices would be to just set a reminder on your phone and, and have it go off every hour, every 90 minutes.

And Do some breath work or do some spinal rotation, something that you can do to tap back into the body and that awareness. And then lastly, as you mentioned, the philosophical meditations, those are different things that you can do, like Forms of gratitude or sayings part of one of my meditation teachers.

He had me memorize all 81 sayings of the Tao Te Ching. If you ever read that book at all, um, and in there, there's just a wealth of knowledge. And so you go through and you could use that philosophical side of the training as either a ritual practice or an active practice.

Kara Goodwin: Okay. Yeah, that's, that's amazing. Um, I'm [00:11:00] curious about yielding. This is something that I, I found in my research with you. So tell us what yielding is and how it can be used in everyday life.

Jeff Patterson: Yeah, so there's lots of concepts in the martial arts that we use and yielding to me is one of the coolest concepts that is comes out of the martial arts. And, you know, a lot of times people ask me why I do meditation or why I do Tai Chi. They never ask why I do jujitsu or boxing, but they're always wondering what the benefit of meditation is.

And oftentimes I'll tell them that. If the only benefit of a meditator practice was developing yielding skills, it would be enough for me to want to do the practice because yielding is so rich and deep and can be used in every area of your life. And my book that I just wrote, The Yielding Warrior, it's all about different life applications and training exercises that you can do to develop yielding skills.

[00:12:00] And there's three different kinds of yielding. There's physical yielding, mental yielding, and emotional yielding. And physical yielding is the easiest one to understand. It's used in, in combat sports and athletics. It's the idea that, you know, I push you, you push me, whoever's the bigger, stronger person with the most leverage would push the other person over.

But with yielding, instead of us trying to see who the bigger meat head is, when you push me, I get out of the way of that force and now I can respond with less effort. No. In martial arts, this is important to know how to do, because if I'm walking down the street and I come up against some guy who's 250 pounds and can pick up a Volkswagen bug, I'm not going to want to wrestle that guy to the ground.

I'm going to want to yield to his force and get around him so I can try to survive that encounter. And so. We do that at whether you play basketball or soccer or, uh, in any athletic sports. And in fact, I don't, I'm sure you probably have heard of who Phil Jackson is. He used to coach, [00:13:00] um, the Chicago bulls and Michael Jordan was on the team.

And he also coached the LA Lakers. Well, he used to have his teams practicing meditation, Tai Chi and yoga. And. Part of that is helping them develop those, those skills of understanding how to be more in tune and how to use the yielding approach. And that's the idea of physical yielding. And now physical yielding is easy to understand the concept.

But it's very difficult and takes years and years to get to a high level. But the cool thing about it is from day one, when you start doing this practice, you start to notice things internally in a lot finer detail. You start noticing your root and your. tension and relaxation, your breath, your, your emotional state.

You start seeing things that are a lot more fine and a lot more in tune than you normally would as going through our busy [00:14:00] days. And this is where we start moving into mental yielding. Which is really cool, and that when you start seeing those things inside yourself, you also start seeing them more clearly in other people.

So say, for example, I say something that unsettles you, and I pick up on it when it's like this. It's a lot easier to adjust the conversation and keep us in a happy place, than if I'm not paying attention to that, pretty soon I'm so far off track, you want to knock me upside the head. And so using yielding, Um, in all of our interactions and conversations and relationships is very powerful.

And this can be in our personal relationships and work and sales and business and negotiations. I mean, many ways that we can use this strategy. Then we have mental yielding and, or excuse me, emotional yielding and emotional yielding is very much like mental yielding. But it's with your own interpersonal conflicts.

So say, for example, most people go through the day with emotional ups and downs. [00:15:00] Well, rather than being like a roller coaster with yielding, and we start to see things start to move up, we can use our breath, use our strategy to bring it back down. Or if we start to see things fall, we can bring it back up.

And now when we see things like this, instead of getting too distracted down this one path and wasting a lot of time and energy on it, we can navigate. and be a lot more balanced. And we use different tools like the breath and the regulation of the body and the mind and all of that to help with these different kind of ways of balancing the body and our emotional state.

And, you know, when I, when I start explaining this to people, which I've been doing for years, I've been running my academy for 30 years here now. And, uh, Oftentimes people will say, Oh, that makes so much sense. You know, I use yielding all the time and I totally agree. Everybody does yielding to some degree all the time, but it's kind of [00:16:00] like, you know, if you or I were to walk into a crime scene with a detective who's been on the job for 30 years.

He would see things about that scene in the timeline that we would have no clue of what's going on. Whereas the meditative ARPS helps us see things inside ourselves and inside of other people that I feel like you could never see and never pick up on without that practice.

Kara Goodwin: That's beautiful. Thank you for sharing that. I'm I'm curious to go back to something that you talked about early earlier, which is what drew you to the martial arts and to boxing. You know, your whole meditation journey began with this fascination with, uh, Uh, boxing and martial arts. And, and the, the meditation kind of came later, a little bit later.

It sounds like if I've got

Jeff Patterson: Yes.

Kara Goodwin: correctly. Um, and [00:17:00] so to me there, you've done a great job of talking about the intricacies and how they go, all go together. But I would imagine for a newcomer, somebody who's attracted to, uh, Boxing, for example, and you say yourself, the meditation piece, you were a little bit like, well, what does this have to do with anything? And it was kind of a surprise as to why one would lead to the other. Um, how has your relationship changed with boxing, for example, or the love of martial arts as that part of you has developed?

Jeff Patterson: It's only deepened and given me a new found respect for it because I've seen it multiple different levels that I don't know if I ever would have gotten to or at least not as fast or

from as many different [00:18:00] directions if it wasn't for the meditative path.

Kara Goodwin: Okay. And are you still doing boxing or is it, is boxing even considered really a martial art or is that a little bit different?

Jeff Patterson: Yeah, I, I think any combat sport could be considered a martial art. Um, so yeah, here at the Academy, we do Western boxing, Muay Thai kickboxing, Brazilian Jiu Jitsu, Eskrima, and then we have our meditative program, which is Tai Chi, Qi Gong, Bagua, Xing Yi, and I Chuan.

Kara Goodwin: Okay. Interesting. So what does your, your meditation practice you yourself as a busy, Business owner and, uh, author and all of the different initiatives that you have in all the students under your wing for you personally. What does your meditation practice look like now? So

Jeff Patterson: Well, I, I practice every day. Um, I haven't missed. [00:19:00] Uh, a day of my morning rituals since my hip surgery about four years ago. Uh, and so I'm, I'm on it all the time. It's, I've just seen so much benefits from the practice that. You know, I never, never am going to stop. Uh, you know, when I, when I first started doing the meditative arts and my boxing coach was teaching me a Tai Chi form, he taught me three movements and he told me that he wanted me practicing about an hour a day.

And so, I would do this and I would go down to my basement every day. And I practiced for about an hour and I was just doing these three simple movements that you could show somebody in one class and two or three months goes by and he hadn't shown me anything else. And I'm still doing these two or three movements and I wasn't just doing an hour a day.

I would do about an hour and a half a day because everything he told me to do, I treated like it was gold and I really wanted to impress him and, [00:20:00] and do as much as I could to get good, you know? And, and so at about the three or four month mark, I started getting kind of frustrated and feeling like, man, is this guy ever going to show me anything?

What am I doing here with this? And. I'm sure he saw that in me. I was still going to the boxing gym and still meeting up with them and training and, and still pushing that direction. But then at about the six or seven month Mark, I went down to my basement one morning to do my practice and I looked up at the clock and an hour and a half had gone by and it seemed like 15 minutes.

And it was almost magical. I was like, what just happened? How did, how did that time go by so quick? And ever since that day, it's been part of my life and I'm never, never going back. Well,

Kara Goodwin: he didn't end up adding anything new that you [00:21:00] just kind of changed your relationship with the same practice. Is that what you mean?

Jeff Patterson: I didn't add anything new up until that day. Once he realized that I had kind of made that realization, he showed me the rest of the form in about two weeks. And so, and from there, my, you know, my practice is just as, as blossomed, you know, I've studied a lot of different areas of the meditative arts, um, but that's how, that's what originally got me started.

And I think. A lot of times people get discouraged because they try meditation. And, you know, one of the most common things I've heard people say through the years, and I've had a lot of students come through the academy, probably well over 24, 000 students just here at my physical location. And one of the most common things I hear people say is that I've tried meditation, but I can't do it because I can't quiet my mind.

Meditation isn't about quieting your mind. It's kind of like building muscle. [00:22:00] You know, you do more reps to get stronger. If you just go out and do one rep of bench press, you're not going to get very strong, but when you sit down and you meditate for say 20 minutes or an hour or whatever that is for you, your mind is going to get distracted.

Everybody's does no matter who they are. And so. When your mind gets distracted and you use your focus and your intent to bring it back to center and whatever that meditation is, whether it's an energetic circulation, a body movement, a breath work, whatever it is, and you come back to center and in that 20 minutes, you may do that 100 times, you just got 100 reps of improving your focus and bringing it back to center.

So now when you get stressed or things come up in the day, it's so much easier because you're doing this every day. You're building these reps and you're building that ability to come back to center and find that focus. And that's what meditation is all about. It's a process. And that's why I [00:23:00] say it's so important to integrate it, make it a way of life and not just a hobby that we do once in a while.

Kara Goodwin: I love that. Thank you. So I'm, I'm also interested in something that you said earlier, which was around that there is a spiritual component with meditation and with, I think it was Qigong that you were talking about at that time.

Jeff Patterson: Yes.

Kara Goodwin: Okay. And, um, and of course there are so many different meditation styles, which you also kind of alluded to, but there is, there are styles that utilize the body and they use the sensations of the body and you're really kind of noticing any. Tension and working within the confines of the body to have points of reference and to tune into your energy. And then of course there's transcendental meditation, which, which tends to be kind of transcending the physical and having more of [00:24:00]that, um, spirit connection, you know, kind of getting away from the body.

And then you've got a lot in between. Um, What type of meditation? I presume it's more of a physical, um, but then there's also that spiritual component. So I'm curious about your own practice and what you teach.

Jeff Patterson: So qigong is very deep. Um, when you talk about the spiritual side of the training, you know, we do, part of it is, you know, all, all of qigong, whether it's the, the physical, the medical, the philosophical, the spiritual, it's, it's all. Built on these core fundamental principles and within the Qigong practice itself, there's, you know, Qigong is often referred to as the science of the breath because there's hundreds of different breathing strategies and there's sitting meditation, standing meditation, [00:25:00]energetic circulations in the body.

There's movement forms to generate and activate different parts of the body and work with, um, the different energy channels in the body or the different Dantians. Um, there is just so many different directions. It's a really wonderful, Open practice and you know, in, in China, in Chinese philosophy, they call, um, using the breath balancing the Khan and Lee or the water and fire.

And so in Qigong, we use the breath as a strategy. to get different outcomes. And sometimes in meditations, we might want to be turning inward, like you were mentioning, or we might want to be focusing outward to create an energy outside of us. And we'll use the breath as a strategy to change that energy.

And so kind of an Way to explain that if you're not familiar with this [00:26:00] would be if you think about when you laugh, say, say you're laughing so hard that your belly hurt, you start to sweat. Sometimes your energy is going outward and and that is something we can use with the breath and mimic. To make that energy expand, and that's really good for our creativity, that's really good for, uh, building our immune system.

If you were somebody coming in here who was recovering from chemotherapy, we'd do a lot more yawn. breathing strategies to help build and strengthen the immune system. Then there's the other side. So if you think about a time when maybe you were really depressed or you cried a lot, we're focusing more on the inhale and it's, you know, we're breathing that air in and our inhale breath is a lot longer than our exhale breath.

This is something that brings our energy inward, which is very valuable for some meditations. However, doing a lot of this kind of practice, [00:27:00] especially like, you know, in the middle of winter when the flu season strong is not that great because it helped, it weakens the immune system. And so. Strategically, we do different practices through the year to connect with the different energy.

You know, we have our, our heaven, our universal energy, and we have our earth energy and then our humanity energy and all of those different things are very closely connected and important when you're building a practice that you understand. How to use some of these strategies to get different outcomes.

Kara Goodwin: Hmm. Wow. That's fascinating. Can you explain a little bit more when you talk about that? Inhale actually suppresses the immune system. I've never heard that before. So why is that?

Jeff Patterson: Well, if you go back to thinking about, I don't know if you've ever personally experienced [00:28:00] this, but a lot of people when they get depressed or maybe something bad happens in their life and they're crying a lot and they're, they're really bringing that energy inward, it's coming back to the center line.

And so there's not anything really protecting the outside of the body. Right? And so this. is why oftentimes when people get depressed, they get sick because of that simple reason. And so understanding this, if we want to get to a deeper level of focused, say, for example, you have a very high stress career and you want to bring that stress level down, we would do a lot more yin inward.

Energetic practices to help bring that stress level down, whether it be with your ritual practices or with your active practices. And so you can adjust it. And this is where it becomes really cool because you know, you'll see some people that will go with [00:29:00] high emotional ups and downs and they're like a roller coaster.

Well, when you start to become sensitive to this and learn how to use the breath as a strategy in this way,when you start seeing yourself Come up on a rise. You can use the breath to bring it back down. When you start seeing it start to fall, you can use the breath to bring you back up. And now we can find a lot more balance in our overall physical, energetic and emotional well being, which is what the practice is all about.

Kara Goodwin: That is beautiful. I love that. Well, Jeff, this has just been fascinating and enlightening. I've really enjoyed it. Can you tell people how they can connect with you and remind people of your book and, and, so forth?

Jeff Patterson: Yeah. So I have a free book funnel right now. You can go to the yielding warrior. com forward slash book and get a free copy of my book. You just pay [00:30:00] shipping and handling. I also have an online program that you can check out. You can try it out for a couple of weeks and see if it's something that might resonate with you.

And if you're in Portland, Oregon, you can always come in and check out the Academy as well.

Kara Goodwin: Wonderful. Great. Well, thank you so much. This has, uh, this has just been wonderful. I appreciate you being here.

Jeff Patterson: Thank you. It's been a pleasure.

​